"The ten thousand" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kearney Paul)

FOURTEEN

Off to the north, the Arakosan cavalry had begun to move, six thousand horsemen with the mist of the morning grey about the bellies of their mounts. The ground was packed red and hard under them, the chill of the night holding it firm. The rumble of the horses could be heard and felt over the earth for pasangs on every side. A harbinger of what was to come perhaps, a dark music borne upon the waking world.

The noise woke Gasca from an uneasy sleep, and many others around him. They rose from their cramped ranks, cursed the snag and jab of bronze on their shins, and tugged their cloaks tighter about their torsos, the mist all around them, deep and unknowable as the currents of the sea.

Old Demotes raised his hawk nose to sniff the pre-dawn air and cocked his grey head to one side. “That’s cavalry,” he said. He spat on the ground and bared what remained of his teeth as he stretched his worn and warped limbs into function.

Around him more men rose ahead of reveille, that dark murmur in the earth bringing them out of what scant sleep they had endured. Close on ten thousand spearmen had lain down the bright evening before with their heads pillowed on their shields and their cuirasses biting their hips. Now it was almost a relief to stand up, to make the blood work about the bones and face the thing which had brought them all here.

Gasca checked all his gear automatically, touched the upright planted length of his spear for luck and tried to shiver some warmth into his limbs. The cloak had helped, but his father’s layered cuirass had been stiffened by the cold. His flesh would have to warm it into some kind of compliance before it stopped biting him.

Buridan was walking down the line; he had taken over the Dogsheads after Jason’s promotion and now had the transverse crest of a centurion on his helm. “Up, up, get in rank you motherless fucks. We’ve a big day ahead of us.”

“I hope you slept well, centurion.”

“I dreamed of your mother last night, Bear.”

“Aye, she fucked half the centon in her dreams!”

They rose, pissing where they stood and garnering curses and shoves and the ribaldry which was the meat of an army’s morning. The file-leaders geared up and strode forward a pace or two, bitching and murmuring to each other about where precisely the line should run, and behind them the hastily armouring men fell into their files one after another, pushed, cajoled, and threatened by the file-closers, who counted in each man. When he had six ahead of him, he clapped the shoulder of the man in front, who did the same to the man before him, until the file leader felt the thump on his own shoulder and knew that behind him the file was complete. Buridan then strode down the front of the centon and as he passed each file the leader raised his spear. All down the mist-choked length of the Macht ranks, centurions were doing the same. In the half-light of dawn, the Macht had reformed their battle line in a matter of minutes, whilst to their left the Kefren troops were still milling in bad-tempered disorder, and their officers were cantering up and down among them on horseback, waving swords to get them into place.

The sun rose through the mist; mighty Araian who loved her bed in the north, but in this country seemed eager to rise and reluctant to quit the day. The mist thinned. There was not the breath of a breeze. Even before the sun was well clear of the Magron, the heat had begun to simmer out of the ground itself, and with it the tiny black flies that plagued the low river-country. The ground softened as it warmed, and the Macht spearmen sank an inch into it with all the weight of arms and armour pressing upon their flesh. Gasca heard the file-closer, big Gratus, talking to the light-armed skirmishers who had remained to the rear. “You keep that water coming today. I don’t give a fuck if you have to fetch it all the way from the river, but you keep the skins full, lads.”

“Any word from up front?” someone beside Gasca asked. He was yawning himself, the bronze of the helm constricting his skull. There was a worn spot in the padding within; he should have replaced it before now.

“They’re on the hill, same place as they was last night, except there’s more of them now.”

“Where’s Phiron, I wonder?”

“Licking Kufr arse.” And a mutter of hard laughter went down the ranks.

Arkamenes met with the ten generals of the Macht to the front of their battle line. Phiron and Pasion were there also, every one of them in the transverse crested helm of officers, and every one wearing the Curse of God. They carried their shields on their shoulders and bore spears the same as the lowest infantryman on the field. Arkamenes looked down on them from his horse and when the eyes in the T-slits of the close helms stared back at him he felt a kind of shiver trail down his backbone. He was glad, so very glad, that he was not up on the hill above, waiting to fight these things.

“We will attack,” he said crisply. “My brother has the high ground; he will not leave it, so we must go to him. Phiron, as you have suggested, your people will lead an echeloned advance into his right, and smash that wing. The Juthan have been told to hang back, and only follow on once you have engaged. Then the rest of the line will move up in turn from the right. That way we are less likely to be outflanked. My bodyguard and I will be in the centre. As soon as I mark out Ashurnan, we shall attack him. If the King dies, it is all over. Any questions?”

“When?” Phiron asked.

“I leave that to your discretion. But it should be soon. The heat will be punishing today.”

“Thank you, my lord.”

Arkamenes bent over in the saddle and pulled his komis aside a little. He smiled, his golden face disconcerting so close to theirs. “Good luck, General. If all goes well, when evening comes we shall be rulers of the world.” Then he straightened and kicked his horse, wheeling away to where his bodyguard awaited him in bright and gaudy ranks back at the centre of the army.

Phiron looked round at his fellow officers. “He’s leaving it to us to make the first dent in their line. We must hit them hard as we are able, then wheel left, towards their centre. There the battle will be decided. Arkamenes was right; if we kill their king, they’ll fold.”

“There was cavalry on the move before dawn, Phiron,” Pasion said. “Could be a flank move.”

Phiron nodded. “I’m sure it was. That’s why your Hounds are out on the far right. They’ll have to cover our arse. I need every spear up front if we’re to break these bastards before noon. Jason, your mora is right-handest. The Hounds will be under your orders. If they need help during the morning it is you who will be detailed to assist them. You lead off when you’re ready and we’ll follow on.”

Jason nodded, eyes bright within his helm. He had donned his party-chiton under his armour, and the gold embroidery of it gleamed out incongruously in that sombre gathering.

The twelve of them stood silent a moment, eyes flickering back and forth among themselves. Some of them were smiling.

“Brothers,” Phiron said simply, “let us start the Dance.”

Starting on the right, the Macht line began to move. The men kept the bowls of their shields on their left shoulders, to save their strength, and carried their spears down the length of their right arms, snug against the body. The mud sucked at their feet and broke up their step until they had marched clear of the last night’s ground and were on packed earth and pasture once more. File-leaders and file-closers barked out the time. The men began to march in step, and with that the ground began to echo under their feet, ominous thunder. Jason’s mora, close to a thousand men in eight ranks, led off. After it came Mynon’s, then Orsos’s, then Castus’s, then the morai of Pomero, Argus, Teremon, Durik, Gelipos, and Marios.

To their left the Juthan Legion stood watching as the Macht line moved up the slope towards the King’s army, close on two pasangs of tight-packed men marching in almost perfect time, and now in almost complete silence. Above their heads the centon banners hung heavy in the morning air. Hardly a breeze stirred about the plain, but the heat of the sun had already burned away the last of the mist. The men in the ranks had the sunlight in their eyes for the first few hundred paces, until the shadow of the heights above them cut it off.

The light troops kept pace with the phalanx, and in their midst Rictus strode easily along, his heart thumping so hard it seemed the beat of it would leap up his throat.

“We’ll fight like spearmen today, if we have to,” Agrimos, overall commander of the skirmishers had said. “There’s cavalry out on the right, and we’re to hold our ground against it. No retreating today, boys; no falling back. We fight where we stand.”

At long last, Rictus was to be part of a real battle, not some honourless skirmish fought with knives and javelins. Today would be a spear-fight, and he was wholly glad of it.

Look down on me today, father. Grant me your courage. Help me live or die well before the sun goes down.

Jason, in the midst of his thousand, struck up the Paean. It was taken up by the whole mora almost at once, and travelled down the line until the entire Ten Thousand were singing it, the slow mournful beat of the ancient song clenching their feet in time with one another. As always, Jason felt that cold thrill in his flesh at the sound. The Death hymn of the Macht. It had been millennia since a Great King had heard it, and now here in the heart of the Empire, ten thousand voices were rolling it out with a fine relish, their feet providing the beat. Ten thousand voices, the sound of them echoing off the heights of the hills to their front, the ground rising under them as they marched, and the ranks of the Great King’s army awaiting them at the crest.

This, Jason thought, is what the poets sing of; it is what it means to be truly alive. And as he marched, singing, the tears trickled down his cheeks within the tall-crested helm.

Seated on his quiet mare, Vorus watched the line of spearmen march up the hill with a wall of sound that was the Paean preceding them. He thought he had never seen a sight so fearsome in his life: that moving battlement of scarlet and bronze, that wave of death approaching. All along the Kefren ranks, there was a kind of shudder as the troops moved in restive increments, as a man will flinch before a blow.

“Lord,” he said, “let me go out to the left.”

Ashurnan shook his head. For now, he was standing in the Royal Chariot again, shaded by a parasol and surrounded by bodyguards, couriers and staff officers.

“Stay here, Vorus. They may be coming our way soon enough.”

The Kefren troops on the left had begun to shout and jeer and batter their spears against their shields in an emboldening din of defiance. To their rear the archers had nocked arrows to their bows. A flag went up to show that all was ready. Ashurnan waved a hand, as gracious as a greeting to a friend, and the archers loosed.

All at once the air filled with another noise; the swoop of clothyards blotting out the sun. They rose in a cloud, and then arced down towards the Macht line.

The sound of their strike came even to the Great King’s position, a hammering, clattering madness of metal on metal. Gaps appeared in the ranks of the Macht. Men folded in on themselves, dropped as if pole axed, staggered as though struck by a gale of wind. For a few seconds the line wavered, and the Kefren cheered and shouted in derision and triumph. Then the gaps were closed, the phalanx drew itself together, and the Macht came on.

An order was shouted, carried down their line, and the first three ranks of the Macht levelled their spears. Another series of orders, and they picked up the pace to a lumbering trot. Ten paces from the Kefren line they uttered a hoarse roar, and then plunged forward.

The crash of the battle lines meeting, a sound to make the hearer flinch. It carried clear down the valley, and close on that unholy clash there came the following roar of close-quarter battle. The ten thousand Macht slammed into forty thousand Kefren like some force out of nature. In the rear of the Kefren left the archers loosed another volley, twenty thousand arrows overshooting to pepper the ground behind the Macht army. Before them, the ranks of their spearmen were shoved bodily backwards, pressing in on each other. Vorus could see the glittering aichmes of the Macht darting forward and back at their bloody work all along the line, like teeth in some great machine, whilst the men in the rear ranks set their shields in the back of the man in front, dug their heels into the soft ground, and pushed. The Kefren phalanx staggered under that pressure, as a man’s stomach will fold in on the strike of a fist. The battle line was simultaneously chopped to pieces and pushed in on itself. Vorus found the breath clicking in his throat. It had been a long time. He had forgotten what his people looked like in battle, and what savage efficiency they brought to war.

Now the Juthan legion on the Macht left was marching up the hill, and to the left rear of it the traitor’s entire battle line was on the move, pinioning the King’s troops with the threat of their approach. An advance in echelon; brilliant. This Phiron knew his tactics. All along the plain below, for fully six pasangs, great formations of troops were on the move. For the moment, the traitor’s armies had the initiative, but that was part of the plan.

Gasca had moved up from the fifth rank to the third, and now was stabbing overhand with his spear whilst the crushing weight of the men behind him forced him forward. In the frenzied press of the phalanx he periodically felt his feet lifted off the ground and was borne along bodily by the close-packed crowd. He ducked his helm behind the rim of his shield as an enemy spearhead came lancing out at his eyes, was jolted by the impact of the point on his helmet, and stabbed out blindly, furiously. Under his feet, bodies squirmed in the gathering muck and the men behind him with their spears still upright were jabbing downwards with their sauroters, finishing off the wounded, grinding their heels into Kufr faces. The heat was indescribable, the sound deafening, even over the sea-noise of the bronze helm. This was the othismos, the very bowels of warfare. It was where men found themselves or lost themselves, where all their virtues were stripped away, leaving only courage; for one could not endure the othismos without it.

The line lurched forward as the Kufr ranks shrank from the Macht juggernaut. The file leaders shouted hoarse, half-heard commands and from the rear the unrelenting pressure of the file-closers ground the phalanx onwards. Dead men were carried upright in the files, held there by the press of flesh and bronze. The aichmes of the first three ranks stabbed out endlessly. Shearing the sheep this was called, the decimation of the front ranks of the enemy with skilful spear-work, a hedge of wicked metal plunging into the enemy’s faces, shoulders, chests, bellies, anywhere there was an opening. The Kufr infantry were not so heavily armoured as the Macht, and the spear-points were drilling clear through their wooden shields, the leather caps and corselets of their panoplies. Gasca found himself stepping over a layered mound of corpses and half-dead, squirming things that the rear ranks spiked through and through with their sauroters.

A spear-blow to his shield-rim stretched the metal. The men in the front ranks had their heads down as though sheltering from a storm. Many had gashed and bleeding spear-arms from the thrusts of their own comrades behind them. Gasca rested his spear on the shoulder of the file-leader, three ranks ahead; it seemed insufferably heavy. The file-leader’s spear broke off in the body of a Kufr maniac who threw himself at the line of shields, and he flipped the shaft round, tearing up the thigh of the second-rank man as he did so. With the sauroter now facing forward, he began stabbing out with as much energy as before. In this mass of sharp bronze and iron the flesh of men was a fragile thing, to be scored and sliced without comment or complaint. They were expendable parts in the machine, and they would endure their role without complaint until the thing was done. That was part of the philosophy of the othismos.

Ten thousand Macht, pressing forward with all the professionalism of their calling. The Kefren spearmen could not hold back that mass of murder. The deep formations of troops here on the left, stacked up to absorb the Macht assault, became a weakness rather than a strength. Reserve regiments, moving forward to the aid of their comrades, became close-packed by the ordeal of the men at the front, packing lines of bodies against the enemy spearheads.

The Kufr army was pulling back; no, it was in flight-but the flight was so constricted as to be a mere shuddering of movement, no more.

But the Macht felt it. A lessening of pressure, like pushing on a stiff-hinged door past the point of equilibrium. A knowledge that the back of this thing is broken.

Those in the Kefren front rank were showing their backs now, pushing and clawing at the men behind them to get away from the spears. These whose courage had failed were stabbed to bloody quivering meat and their toppling bodies entangled the legs of the next rank; the struggling mob that resulted was cut down without mercy. Gasca found himself hiccoughing with a manic kind of laughter as he stabbed out over the shoulders of the men in front of him. The pressure from the rear had eased somewhat, and the Macht ranks were opening up as the enemy to their front disintegrated. Now Gasca felt the rasp of his tongue about his teeth, the taste of salt about his lips: sweat and splashed blood. His legs were scarlet to the knee, and the ground under all their feet stood pocked with puddles of blood where it was not carpeted with the enemy dead. The Great King’s left wing had been smashed asunder.

A gap opened up between the fleeing Kufr and the remorseless, ordered ranks of the Macht. The order to halt was ferried down the line by men whose throats could barely sustain speech. And the phalanx halted, the men breathing hard, many bending to vomit. Up through the opening files came light-armed skirmishers with skins of water hanging from their shoulders. These were passed up and down the line. Gasca managed a few swallows before passing it on, and closed his eyes as the stale, warm liquid set his tongue to moving in his mouth again.

Now the centurions left the ranks and came to the fore. Jason was up front with them, gesticulating, his black armour all ashine with blood, half his helm-crest hacked away. The Kufr left wing was a mob of retreating figures running downhill in their thousands, cavalry mixed in with infantry, officers beating their men with the flat of their swords. The ground they left behind them was littered with cast away shields and weaponry, and straggling wounded by the hundred were dragging themselves at their rear, limping on spear-shafts or crawling on hands and knees, crying out to their fellows not to leave them behind. A few centons of Macht skirmishers went chasing after them, hurling javelins into their spines or finishing off the wounded where they crawled and screamed on the ground. A centurion called them back, cursing them for ill-disciplined fools, and they came trotting up the slope again shame-faced and with arms bloody to the elbows. A few had severed heads hanging from their belts. Gasca wondered where Rictus was, and if he had been anywhere near the meat of the fighting. He would have a story to tell him tonight, by Antimone’s Veil.

A trembling took him, and he had to clench his teeth tight against the sob which ballooned in his chest. A whimper made it out his mouth, and another. He disguised it with a fit of coughing, but then felt a thump on the back of his cuirass. Old Demotes, his white beard dyed rust-red as it trailed out the bottom of his helm. “It’s all right, lad. It’s the Goddess. She must have her say. Let her out, and you’ll be better off.”

“Back in line-back in line you fuckers!” someone was shouting. It was Orsos, running up and down the relaxed ranks with his helm off and his spear resting on his shoulder. His shaven head gleamed white with sweat in the sunlight and there was spittle flying from his mouth. “Jason! Jason-we’ve cavalry coming up on our right and rear, maybe ten morai of them. Wheel your men about to the right. We’re taking the rest into the Kufr centre. Do you hear me, Jason?”

The cavalry came on in a wave, tall horses bearing shrieking Kufr with luminous eyes and billowing, multi-coloured robes. They had scimitars, javelins, and a few stabbing spears. Their line extended two pasangs to left and right. Had the ground been firmer, they would have made it into a gallop, so frenziedly were the riders beating their wild-eyed and snorting mounts. But here the earth had been churned into a mire by the infantry battle, and the hillside was strewn with dead and dying of both sides and bristling with spent arrows, like the hair on a man’s forearm when the cold hits it. So they advanced at a fast trot, some horses tripping up and toppling even at that. There were thousands-Rictus had not believed there could be so many of the beasts in the world. The ground shook under their hooves, and the blood rippled in its muddy craters.

They rode down their own wounded. At a hundred paces the skirmishers threw their first volley of javelins. There were perhaps three morai of light troops out here on the Macht right, and for the moment they were entirely unsupported. The heavy troops were at the top of the hill with their backs to the cavalry.

A second volley. Fifty paces. There would not be time for a third. “Spears!” Rictus shouted. “Close up, close up!”

They had not been drilled for this, unlike their heavier brethren. They did not come together in a solid line, but in clumps and knots of men and boys, pelta shields on their left arms, single-headed spears thrusting out on the right. Rictus felt a moment of pure, almost incapacitating terror. He had never been charged by cavalry before; none of them had.

The big horses struck home. Some, confined by their fellows on right and left, charged straight into the spears. Most streamed to left or right of the broken, scattered line, their riders hacking at the heads of the skirmishers as they passed by. Rictus and his comrades were islands in a raging sea of horseflesh and hacking steel. They stabbed out at the bellies of the animals and in moments had a bank of the injured beasts thrashing around them, riders pinned beneath their carcasses or finished off before they could rise out of the mud. But more and more cavalry kept streaming past, turning and coming back again, hooves hammering the ground into a bloody morass, bogging themselves down. There was no fluidity to the fight; the cavalry did not charge and counter-charge. They slogged through the light troops of the Macht in bursts of pure mass and muscle, and bore down the defenders by numbers and bulk.

Rictus’s half-centon was now facing out on all directions, surrounded. In their midst a dozen dead and dying horses made a sort of bulwark. Thrusting his spear at a passing rider, Rictus leaned his foot on the equine carcass before him and felt the warmth and heartbeat of the animal as it lay dying in the bloody mud, not comprehending why it should have to endure the agony of such an end. He killed it with a spear-thrust to the brain, unable to listen to its screaming gurgles. When the Kufr went down they screamed no less piteously, but that afforded his conscience no trouble at all.

The sun climbed higher on that endless morning. It topped the hills upon which the Great King’s armies now struggled and came bursting over the battle, setting alight a million tiny shards of reflected light, caught on helmets, spearpoints, and sword-blades, on the sweat of men’s flesh and in the madness of their eyes. The Kufr cavalry fought in a cloud of their mounts’ steam and the sun caught it and made wands and bars of restless light that speared through the carnage in a bitter kind of beauty. The Arakosan horsemen had been brought to a bloody halt by the amorphous ranks of the Macht skirmishers, and now some eight or nine thousand soldiers were embroiled in a charnel-house of blood and muck and animals screaming out on the Kefren left wing. For perhaps two square pasangs the tortured, sucking ooze that was the earth could not be seen below the maddened press of men and animals contending there. All thoughts of higher tactics were lost as the base struggle went on. But though the skirmishers were being steadily destroyed, they had protected the flank of the heavy infantry. The Macht spearmen were wheeling left on the crest of the hill, by morai, and were now advancing once more, their ranks thinner now, but as ordered as they had been at the beginning of the day. Before them, the Kefren centre was pulling back, threatened now by the Ten Thousand to the south and the advancing Juthan Legion to the west. The Kefren right wing was being hurled forward, courier after courier urging the Great King’s generals there to advance at the double, to support the King’s position on the right. A line of troops four pasangs long thus began to wheel inwards to try and catch the echeloned regiments of Arkamenes’s army before they could close the pincers of their formations. More cavalry led the way, this time the heavy lancers of the Asurian heartland with their blue and gold enamelled armour. These burst forward out of the Kefren line with all the dash and brilliance of a kingfisher’s strike, and began thundering down the slope towards the contingents from Tanis and Istar below, five thousand strong, fresh and unblooded.

“We should move back,” Vorus said to Ashurnan. He had taken off his helm the better to dictate to the battle-scribes and now his gaze swivelled back and forth between the advancing Macht on their left and the Juthan legion to their front. The Kefren left wing had been beaten up so badly it was beyond rallying; the plain behind the hill was black with fugitives for two pasangs, thousands of troops throwing down their weapons and their honour in a bid to escape the Macht killing-machine. What had once been their centre was now a flank. Forty thousand men, blown away like dead leaves in autumn. He would not have believed it had he not witnessed it with his own eyes.

“We should perhaps have hired some of these fellows ourselves,” Ashurnan said. There was a smile on his face, and though fear had paled the gold of his shining skin, the humour in his tone was genuine. “No matter. We shall just have to do the thing with what remains.”

“My lord, you must pull further back from the front line,” Vorus grated.

“Look down there, General, to the right of their Juthan troops. You see the horsetail standard? That is my brother. I have a hankering to meet with him. It has been a long time since we looked into one another’s eyes.”

The Macht had started up the Paean again, and their line was lengthening as mora after mora came up to right and left. Their discipline was incredible. Just over a pasang separated the spearheads of their front rank from the Great King’s chariot.

“Bring me my horse,” Ashurnan said. He was not watching the Macht, but the horsetail standard that bobbed above the press of advancing men on the slopes below. “Vorus, I want you to hold on here. Retreat if you must, but slow your countrymen down. Buy me time.”

For what? Vorus wondered, thoroughly alarmed now. The Great King had climbed out of his chariot and was mounting a tall Niseian. An aide brought him his cedar-wood lance. Prancing with impatience around them were the great horses of his bodyguard cavalry, and in their midst the standard-bearer with the winged symbol of the Asurian kings upon a twelve-foot staff.

“I go to greet my brother,” Ashurnan said; he smiled again as he said it. His father’s smile. The protests died in Vorus’s throat.

He bowed. “I will hold them, my lord, or I will die trying.”

Ashurnan leaned in the saddle and grasped Vorus’s shoulder. “Do not die. I have too few friends already.” Then he straightened, raised his hand, and around him the great mass of cavalry, a thousand at least, began to move, the Kefren nobility following their king down the hillside and into the maw of war.

The battle lines had veered round. Both the rebel right and the Great King’s right were advancing, as though following agreed-upon steps in some cataclysmic dance. Arkamenes’s centre was now almost upon the Royal line at the crest of the hill. The Great King led his thousand-strong bodyguard of heavy cavalry straight into this, the roar of that meeting coming even to the Macht spearmen two pasangs to the south. The rebel advance halted, recoiling from the impact of these, the finest cavalry of the Empire, whilst another three pasangs to the north the Asurian cavalry had also made contact with the rebel left. The entire field was now a milling scrum of troops, and where the fighting was heaviest the earth beneath their feet was tormented into a calf-deep morass of sucking mud in which the wounded were trampled and suffocated beneath the feet of those still fighting.

Young Morian had fallen; his neck hacked half-through by a shrieking Kufr horseman. Beside his corpse, Rictus had taken the second blow on his pelta, and the keen blade had sheared off half of it even as he raised his own spear and took his attacker in the armpit, above the leather corselet. The Kufr tilted and slid down the side of his horse, the animal maddened with rage and fear. It reared up and Rictus stabbed it in the belly, a twisted rope of intestine springing out of the hole the aichme made. Then the poor beast lurched away, hooves caught up in its own entrails as it strove to run from the agony, trailing its dying master by one hopelessly entangled stirrup. It careered into two other riders, their mounts already hock deep in the bloody mud. Rictus discarded his shattered shield, staggered forward, and jabbed his spear at these two in turn. He caught one in the thigh, the other about the groin. They shrieked with a sound not remotely human, their eyes bright as some gems dug out of the mountains. Rictus let the flesh-stuck spear go as their horses staggered and tilted and fought the mud. On his hands and knees he crawled over carcasses and through the bloody mire to regain what was left of his centon. Whistler left the ragged ranks to pull him back in, over a rampart of horseflesh. There were spears and shields aplenty about it in the hands of the dead and so Rictus re-armed himself for the third time that morning, his palms sticking to the spear-shaft, some other man’s blood the glue. He looked at Whistler; the older man’s bald head was a cap of blood, his scalp hanging down one ear. But he managed a gap-toothed grin all the same. There was no need to speak.

At the start of the morning this had been a bare and smooth slope of scrub-peppered earth, wide and open enough to have run footraces upon.

Now the work of war had transformed it into a swamp within which the corpses piled up in banks and outcrops of carrion like soft, rotting boulder-fields. It was no longer ground for cavalry, but the Arakosans were slogging it out to the end, their horses almost immobilised under them. What bastard brings a horse to war? Rictus wondered, outraged to the brim of his exhausted mind, shattered by the slaughterous waste, the stunning profligacy of the enemy.

Nevertheless, the Macht had been beaten here. Of the three thousand skirmishers who had held this slope at the start of the morning, there might be a thousand left who were still standing weapon in hand. And these would soon follow their fallen friends into the mud. They knew this, but they fought on because they also knew that behind them, up on the hill, the line of their heavy kindred had its back to them. Should the enemy break through their ranks there would be a slaughter on the hillcrest which would make this one seem trivial by comparison.

So the skirmishers, who had not been trained or created for this task, stood their ground. Because they were Macht, and it was what they had been ordered to do.

For Arkamenes the morning had been a marvel of sensation, the ultimate spectacle. Not even the most jaded libertine could fail to have his senses aroused by this, the grandest kind of theatre. I say go, he thought, and they go. They die in thousands, the lines move, the thing is done. I have said it shall be so, and so it becomes.

He had never been so happy in his life.

He had seen the Macht march up the hill and had watched them annihilate the Great King’s left wing, an army in itself. The cavalry which had ambushed the Macht had been fought to a standstill by their camp-servants. He could see that struggle still going on, a dark stain on the land some three pasangs to the south. He could also see the Macht battle line reforming on the hilltop. Soon they would advance and take on the Great King’s centre. When that happened he would lead his personal bodyguard up the hill to complete the victory, to be in at the kill.

It was hot, now that the sun had climbed. He could feel the heat of it even through the fine linen of his komis, and the jewelled breastplates of his bodyguard were too bright to look upon. He held out his hand, and a Kefren attendant placed within it a cool goblet of spring-water.

The water was never drunk. Halfway to his lips, the goblet stopped, and hung there in the air, his fingers suddenly cold about it. There it was, the Great King’s standard, the holy symbol of Asuria. And it was coming down the hill towards him in the midst of a great cloud of fast-moving cavalry.

The goblet spun through the air and the tall Niseian half-reared under Arkamenes, catching its master’s shock. He wrestled and beat the animal to quiet, staring. It could not be.

The enemy cavalry took a loop out to the north a few hundred paces, to avoid striking the ranks of the Juthan Legion now making its dogged way up the hillside. They wheeled back in like fish in shoal, not in ordered ranks, but a crowd of superb horsemen following their leader-and that leader was out in front now with a bright scimitar raised up to catch the flash of the sunlight.

Arkamenes drew his own sword and waved it forwards. “Go, go go!” he cried to the Kefren horsemen about him, his mind reaching for words but not finding them in its tumult.

The enemy cavalry struck his own at a gallop, a thunderous crash of flesh and metal; suddenly the war came near and to be smelled and felt and feared. Back, the stationary ranks of the rebel horse were crushed by the impact, some bowled over in the first onset, others smashed onto their haunches, riders pinned in the melee, legs broken between the ribs of the maddened animals. From these platforms of plunging flesh their masters hacked at each other with bright swords or stabbed overhand with their lances, the points and blades clashing amid flurries of sparks. Asurian steel struck Asurian steel, Kefren killing Kefren, and the momentum of the enemy charge was still felt through the horseflesh and the confusion, the King’s standard rearing up like a raptor above the killing.

Ashurnan’s bodyguard were the finest warriors of their race, mounted on the mightiest warhorses the Empire could breed. And they had momentum on their side. The Great King fought his way forward, and those who died under his blade saw that there was a kind of gladness on his face, a recklessness. He did not expect to live long, and so meant to live well for what remained of this life to be measured in moments, the mere drips of an almost empty waterclock. His followers had caught his mind and were with him in the moment, wholly reconciled. Even Arkamenes, watching, thought there was a kind of beauty about it. And for one broken second, he found himself loving the brother he had known as a boy, who had been his conscience and his ally. That familiar face, transfigured so as to be a boy’s again.

The second passed, and there was only the murderous insane violence of the present and the task in hand, something to grasp through the fog of fear and confusion. Arkamenes’s bodyguard had been pressed back in a mass by the concussion of the King’s charge, and now there was nowhere to go. Even if a man were able to dismount in that milling crush he would be trampled underfoot within seconds.

The currents that moved the melee were created by killing, by the sheer brutal struggle of one against another. The Great King moved forward, horses going down as he and his guards stabbed at the big veins in the neck, or transfixed them through the eyes. Arkamenes’s bodyguards fought back with the savagery of the trapped, but though they were Honai, they were not the Honai of Ashur, and they gave ground, dying and falling and turning their faces from their own deaths instead of trying to deflect the killing blades as they realised they had become carrion.

And so Ashurnan and Arkamenes met in the middle of that vast bloodletting, in the end both willing that it should be so, in the end neither afraid, in the end brothers again.

Their eyes met but they did not speak, though both of them had words they would have said. Their blades clicked off one another. Under them the tall Niseians charged at each other’s shoulders and tried to bite and rear, but were reined in by both their masters as the swords flickered out and clashed and sought the life of the other in a kind of dance, in its way a splendid thing. But Ashurnan had always applied himself better to the learning of such skills, and it was his blade which sliced home first. Though he had put his strength into the blow, he tried to take it back as he saw it would go home, not even conscious of the reason. But the keen blade did not need much muscle at its back to do the work, and the edge took Arkamenes under the chin, severing the big arteries there and the windpipe, before sliding free.

The rebel prince dropped his sword and clasped both hands to his gaping throat. His mouth worked, frog-like, and in his eyes there was terror, and a kind of regret. Then he toppled from his horse. Around him, his bodyguards saw the death of all their hopes, and sent up a kind of wail. Some threw down their swords and raised their eyes to the sky as if in prayer, others turned their horses around and tried to fight their way to the rear. The horsetail standard that signified the presence of the pretender was cast aside, disappearing in that great mass of bloody, struggling flesh. And as the standard fell, a kind of shudder, more felt than seen, went through the ranks of Arkamenes’s army.